Winter 2017 Bloggiesta To Do Post

I love Bloggiesta for reminding me to brush up and take of my blog, and doing it "in community", so to speak, makes this housework a little more fun.

Given my earlier whining about feeling out-of-it with my blog, I'm really excited there's a mini-event this coming weekend in which I can do some backend work here.

My to do list is pretty simple:
  • make a top 10 of 2016 post (even if it is just a list!)
  • review the book I just finished!
I'd like to start 2017 without a backlog of reviews, so it feels important I keep up. We'll see if I'll tackle my 2016 backlog. (Perhaps for another Bloggiesta!)

Comments

  1. Two good choices.

    I already did mine. :) Over achiever...LOL!!

    Have fun.

    Elizabeth
    Silver’s Reviews
    MINI BLOGGIESTA 2017

    ReplyDelete

  2. Great goals! Good luck, and have fun!

    ReplyDelete

  3. I've missed the last couple, so I'm jumping back in on this Bloggiesta! A mini one sounds just right, and I've got a 3-day weekend to work with. I never did my 2016 favorites list, so maybe it's not too late for me, either? Good luck! (P.S. I see you're reading Swing Time, too. I'm halfway through, and trying to make it last!)

    ReplyDelete

  5. Good goals. Immediate and achievable, although it's so hard to pick just 10 books.

    I like your TBR list.

    ReplyDelete

  6. Simple and to the point, great list! Have a great rest of the mini Bloggiesta

    ReplyDelete

  7. good luck.. always hard to come with top 10 lists.. :)

    ReplyDelete

  8. I hope you accomplished your goals for this weekend! I still need to write a rough draft of a review to complete my Bloggiesta to-do list. Other than that I'm pretty much done!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekend reads and birthday month...

Image
My wife's birthday was last weekend, which coincided with the ten year anniversary of our meeting! She got everything she wanted, from a homemade gourmet dinner to marathon-ing the Star Wars movies because I had never seen them. But we have a tradition in our family of celebrating the 'birthday month' which means my wife gets a few more weekends of fancy dinners made by me and dictating how we spend our weekends.  (Non-negotiable will be disassembling our Christmas tree, which we've obviously put off for weeks, oops!)

This weekend I'm reading Peter Swanson's The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. (The picture is from last night, not this morning -- I only do champagne before noon, and only on weekends!)

What are you reading this weekend?
Read more

Book Review: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Image
First line: Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.

I had to grit my teeth to get through this book. (All 209 pages.)

I'm ashamed to admit this since a surprising number of folks online and in person have cited this novella as one of their favorite books, but I found everything about this brief read to be agonizing -- the plot, the narrative style, the characters -- it and I just did not connect.

I went in expecting to love this book given its reputation and subject matter. Achebe depicts the story of a Nigeria broken by white colonialism; our hero is deeply flawed and stubbornly committed, living in a world with problems triply complicated by the unnecessary influence of white colonizers. Achebe's narrative style is straight-forward and clear, even as he articulates a world deeply foreign to modern audiences.

I suspect I didn't understand this book; I'm also not a huge fan of tragedies (I loathe Hamlet) so Okonkwo as a character didn'…
Read more

Book Review: Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel

Image
First line: --Central, this is Lapetus. Target in sight.

This is the final novel in the Themis Files trilogy (I reviewed the previous two novels, Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods.) 

I'm not going to summarize the plot because I don't want to end up spoiling anything. As a concluding novel, it did everything I needed a final book to do: wrapped up plot threads, answered the mysteries, and provided some final flash bang.

As with his previous novels, I think some of Neuvel's characterizations are thin -- no doubt because the story is told through transcripts and journal entries -- and it left me a little impatient with the story.

These were fast reads, so if you want a Michael Bay-esque summer action flick in a book, this trilogy will do it.

Title:Only Human
Author: Sylvain Neuvel
Genre: Fiction (Sci Fi / Speculative / Mecha / Aliens / Parenthood / Social Commentary / Warfare)
Publisher/Publication Date: Del Rey (5/1/2018)
Source: Edelweiss

Read more